The total human population of the world matters a great deal. Rising populations, or declining populations, have set the path of empires for several millennia, and one can tell a great deal about a population by simply tabulating how many people occupy a given geography. Rising populations indicate at least enough food for people to thrive, and a falling population could indicate a willingness of the natives to take great risks to move away and start anew, somewhere else.
It has only recently begun to break through popular consciousness that the population of the world has ceased rising at the rate it was only recently going, and the peak and then fall of human numbers is upon the near horizon. In many of the most successful industrialized counties of the world, at the peak of their wealth, they have ceased to have enough children to keep the population level. These stark demographic facts have evaded popular conversation even though they are as fundamental as a potential invasion by a hostile power or as deadly as a pandemic, and yet, there has been few public acknowledgments and, in most places, until recently, no public action.
Perhaps it’s because a population rise or fall has to do with ‘family formation’ which is a modern way to summarize the process of men impregnating women so t those women have babies. The issue is as complicated as sex, power, religion, progeny, inheritance, and hope. No one wants to place these human emotions and aspirations into the bloodless language of demographics, but the individual actions and choices people make add up to the population, and it either rises or falls. In the bank account of human resources, the number of people is going up or down. It has never stayed static. There is no ideal number of people who should exist on earth at any given time so the numbers tell whatever story we wish.
The idea that there might soon be too few people runs into the popular impression, promoted through the decades by governments and environmental organizations, as well as any interest dedicated the well being of women, that there are too many people, and that the problem of ‘overpopulation’ is a pressing issue that demands action. These many forces have given the world the idea of ‘family planning’ and made the idea of a ‘teen pregnancy’ into the scarlet letter of our day.
And yet, two things are now perfectly clear to anyone who looks at the data.
The first data point addresses how the population began to rise in the 20th century. The reason is clearly because humans began to live longer. Industrialization led to massive increases in food production, and the spread of basic public health measures radically lowered infant mortality. Vaccines began to roll back the virus threat, and other medical advances pushed the envelope out decades. In 1900, the average life span of an adult in the United States was 41, and yet now, only four generations later, it is closing in on 80. The same phenomenon has occurred the world over at varying rates and at different times, but the result is the same; more people, because the ones who are born don’t die as fast.
In this atmosphere, populations naturally grow older for two reasons. The obvious first reason is that there are more older people who live past what formerly was the oldest age people generally lived. A country with virtually no 60-year-old people begins to have a few, then a few more, and then even more, until 60 is not uncommon at all.
The second reason, however, is the most important. An industrialized society that allows for more 60-year-olds, at the same time, ceases to have the same number of children. The average age in this society begins to creep up as more 60-year-olds live on, and fewer children are born. The average creeps up very slowly at first, and it’s all great. There are fewer kids, more resources per kid, and more working age people to boost economic growth. Everyone gets richer.
But then, nature reasserts itself. Women cannot give birth throughout their longer lives. They have a narrow window to have children, and in an 80 year life, that window makes up about 20% of it. If they don’t produce children in this phase, they won’t ever do it. Lacking a massive breakthrough in incubation technology, this barrier can’t be breeched, and so the relentless math of two kids per woman just to stay level applies.
As a society industrializes, the economic incentives change. Kids cease to be a source of wealth and labor and become a cost center. As traditional religion has declined, the idea of being fruitful has declined with it. People live longer and they need their wealth for themselves, or so they think. If they have no kids, they really do need to save more, and then the idea of no kids and personal savings and expression becomes self-reinforcing.
Nature built many human factors that were meant to drive the human population forward. Women are fertile when they are young and strong. Men are so physically attracted to these women that they have been willing to risk death to have them. An industrialized society undermines this structure, pushes the age at which a child is desirable further out, and punishes the kind of man who competes for women.
We are now well into this human revolution, and it is no longer deniable that the increase in human population has reached its end and was ALWAYS driven by longer lives and not by more babies. The addition to the life span was always at the end, less fertile, part of the age spectrum. This day was always coming and now, it is here. The decline in babies began a long time ago in the earliest industrialized societies. Now, some countries are running out of middle-aged adults. Soon, they will run out of enough productive people to maintain even what they have. This is Germany and Japan right now. China will follow. Smaller cities will empty at a faster rate, which is happening to several states within the US. Immigrants will take over portions of these geographies, but in others, there will be vast, unoccupied spaces where once farmers tilled the land and kids learned from their tribe how to be useful and productive.
Humanity has not adjusted to the end of the 10,000-year agrarian period of history. Industrialization is only about 200 years long. Industrialization brought us here, and we will, in the next 100 years, develop methods of living that accommodate the new realities of human existence. I do not think this will mandate a return to the previous eras of living, because knowledge is durable now, but there will be changes, and those changes must address the purpose of children and family. These changes will force a rethink of the role of the individual, and the natural and desirable relationship between men and women. The role of mothers and fathers must be thought through again. What might not survive this great rethink is traditional marriage between men and women, the legal apparatus that manages human childcare, and the appropriate role of women in society. Breakthroughs in biology will play a role as well.
We are living in transitional times, with all the upheaval that normally comes with them.
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